Kateri shrugs, cool, and then Shannon’s face turns to fear.

“Where is she?” he asks.

Kateri waits.

“Where is Birdie?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” she says.

He stands up, swings, and punches a dent much bigger than his fist into the wall. His knuckle cracks open, bloody.

“I can have you restrained,” Kateri says, her voice louder.

“Fine,” Shannon says. “Can you find my fucking sister?” He has puffed up and she sees it for the first time, the propensity for rage in his curled fist, his hard breathing.

“Please sit down,” Kateri says.

Joel Hurt comes in without knocking, having heard the bang on the wall. He looks at the dent and down at Shannon’s hand.

“Should we move rooms?” Hurt asks. “Interrogation B is open.”

“I think we’re okay,” Kateri says. Interrogation B is a windowless, cinder-block room. She will lose him in there.

Hurt stays, though, his back against the wall, leaning, not asking questions, letting Kateri do her work.

“I need you to think, Shannon,” she says, “about who your sister might have agreed to go with.”

“No one,” he says. “Or, I don’t know, maybe anyone. She’s a little girl,” he says. “She’s never been anywhere. The only people she knows are my mom and me.”

“Are you sure about that?”

His lips part, and his eyes search the ceiling. “I think so,” he says.

“How do I know it wasn’t you who signed her out?” She’s pushing. He doesn’t fit the description the nurse gave her, fortyish, dark haired, unless he disguised himself really well. But she wants to see him react.

“It wasn’t,” he says, point blank.

She pulls out an enlarged copy of the signature on the discharge papers and shows it to him.

“That’s not my signature,” he says.

“That could be an S,” she says, pointing to the flourish.

“In the middle,” he says. “You think I signed it Jenkins, Shannon?” He thrusts the paper back at her. “This is not my signature,” he says.

“What about your father?”

Shannon covers his mouth before he starts speaking again. “Well,” he says. “If my father broke out of prison to sign my sister—who is not even his—out of the hospital, I would hope you would know about it,” he says. “Like, through the police network or something.”

“Do you know for sure that he’s still incarcerated?”

Shannon’s eyes look blank, his lips white. “The last I knew,” he says. He holds out his hand. “Can’t you check that? Don’t you have a database or something?”

“Of course,” Kateri says, but she makes no move to make a note or look anything up. “When’s the last time you had contact with him?” Kateri asks.

She watches him rub his neck and swallow. “I told you,” he says. “Two years ago.”

“After she was born,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Did you tell him?”

“No.”

“What about your mother? Did she have contact with him?”

“My mother was terrified of him,” he says.